WASHINGTON – Five years ago, the most powerful group in Washington was a coterie of President Bush’s foreign policy advisers who called themselves the Vulcans after the Roman god of fire. Along with a select group of intelligence officials, they crafted the administration’s strategy on Iraq and launched the country into war.

Now, as the war rages on and a new Democratic Congress goes on the offensive, the Vulcans are the ones under attack, finding themselves held up to scrutiny in a way they have rarely experienced before.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been subpoenaed to go before Congress. Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy defense secretary, just resigned as World Bank president under an ethical cloud. Former CIA Director George Tenet and former Pentagon policy chief Douglas Feith, both teaching at Georgetown University, have been fending off accusations from Congress, the public – and each other.

Military might

“The Vulcans embodied a point of view that placed the highest priority on American military dominance as the prime aspect of America’s dealings with the world,” said James Mann, whose 2004 best seller, “Rise of the Vulcans,” chronicled the ascendance of this influential war Cabinet. “They proved unable to do what they wanted, and that’s what led to their decline.”

The underlying reason the Vulcans are in disarray is that the Iraq war, their grandest project, is increasingly seen as a foreign policy disaster. While some initially moved on to other powerful positions in and out of government, as violence worsened in Iraq, they have come under attack from a newly empowered Congress and an aggressive press corps, and some have turned to finger-pointing .

Earliest casualty

The first and most obvious casualty was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who resigned after the Democrats swept the midterm elections last November. “I recognize that many Americans voted last night to register their displeasure with the lack of progress being made” in Iraq, Bush said in announcing his resignation.

Vice President Dick Cheney, a charter member of the group, is still in office, but he has some of the lowest popularity ratings of anyone in the administration.

When the Democrats took over Congress, they immediately reopened issues from the prewar planning period, seeking responses to concerns they felt Congress did not pursue under Republican leadership.

“There is a real sense among Hill investigators that, after six years with a Republican Congress, administration officials became accustomed to having their explanations accepted at face value,” said one senior Democratic congressional aide. “Many of the prior inquiries pulled punches, failing to ask the hardest questions, and now that’s coming back to haunt them.”

Pentagon testimony

In February, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the new head of the Armed Services Committee, summoned the Pentagon’s inspector general, and he testified that Feith’s Pentagon office had given senior policy-makers inappropriate “alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and Al-Qaida relationship” inconsistent with those of the intelligence community.

Last month, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, chairman of the House committee on oversight, revisited another issue – how the administration dealt with prewar claims, later discredited, that Iraq sought uranium from Niger. The committee voted along party lines to subpoena Rice. Republicans called it a fishing expedition; Democrats said Rice, as national security adviser at the time, had “primary responsibility to get the intelligence … right.”

Rice said she would respond by letter: “This is an issue that has been answered and answered and answered.” But Waxman last week postponed the hearing to June “to accommodate Secretary Rice’s travel schedule,” and said he was confident she would show up.

Tenet’s memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” portrays administration leaders such as Feith as mischaracterizing intelligence to push the country toward war.

In a book review first printed in The Wall Street Journal that Feith posted on his Web site, he defends his record: “Mr. Tenet is doing in his book just what my office had criticized the CIA for doing in its prewar analysis: omitting information that contradicts preconceived arguments.”

In an interview, Feith said he has not seen Tenet since the book came out last month even though they teach on the same Georgetown campus, but that “I try always to be civil.”

Otto Warmbier was arrested in January 2016 at the end of a brief tourist visit to North Korea. He had been medically evacuated and was being treated at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center when he died at age 22.